3 ms·
> Antihydrogen is made by mixing plasmas of about 90,000 antiprotons from the Antiproton Decelerator with positrons, resulting in the production of about 25,000
by hughes 10y ago
> Antihydrogen is made by mixing plasmas of about 90,000 antiprotons from the Antiproton Decelerator with positrons, resulting in the production of about 25,000 antihydrogen atoms per attempt. Antihydrogen atoms can be trapped if they are moving slowly enough when they are created. Using a new technique in which the collaboration stacks anti-atoms resulting from two successive mixing cycles, it is possible to trap on average 14 anti-atoms per trial
The amount of work that goes in to producing 14 anti-hydrogen atoms is astonishing. It's simultaneously the height of human technical accomplishment yet vanishingly small quantities of the most primitive element possible.
- jerf 10y agoIf you enjoyed that, you may also enjoy the discussions of how people synthesize super heavy elements, such as in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z3oY-XHwss8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z3oY-XHwss8 Superheavy elements even beat antihydrogen on this scale; one of the ones recently named was confirmed to have been synthesized based on only three atoms!
- jhayward 10y agoYes, it's amazing work. Also, don't be fooled that because it is so difficult to produce today that it can't be scaled immensely. Plutonium production was scaled from nanogram levels to ton levels in less than a decade.
- hughes 10y agoWell... 14 anti-hydrogen atoms is a lot less than a nanogram. It's about 1/100th of a trillionth of a nanogram. If we scale up production in the next decade at the same pace you're describing, we might get to nanogram levels.
- jhayward 10y ago> we might get to nanogram levels Right! Now we're talking about some antimatter! Kidding of course. But there is no reason to believe ab initio that it could not be scaled to whatever quantity is useful given enough incentive for that use.
- AnimalMuppet 10y agoA nanogram of antimatter is 90 kilojoules waiting to be released if it touches any regular matter. Not the biggest bomb in the world, but something to be treated with at least mild respect.
- jessriedel 10y agoTo help appreciate the difficulty: Antimatter can only be created from matter by smashing it together with enough energy to spontaneously produce matter-antimatter pairs (more or less). The amount of energy to create an antiproton is about a billion electron volts, while the binding energy to split a hydrogen atom (or antiatom) apart is just 13 electron volts. So you have to cram this fantastic amount of energy into individual particles, then cool them down by 8 orders of magnitude without touching them (to avoid annihilating them).